Keywords and phrases in political speeches

This paper analyses n-grams and concgrams in the speeches of Tony Blair and George W. Bush delivered from the beginning of 2005 till June 2007. The focus of the study is first on the single word climate, which is found to figure high in the now former Prime Minister’s keywords, and then on the cluster climate change, in that change was also picked up as key and was always found in company with climate. This work is an attempt to corroborate the assumption that phraseological combinations, in the form of n-grams and concgrams, i,e. in contiguous and non-contiguous sequences, are usually much better at revealing the “aboutness” of the text than individual words.

Published online: 11 November 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.41.10mil